Game Design Philosophy: Lockpicks?
Around the beginning of the year, I became involved with Lithmeria, first as a builder, then, eventually as the head of building and one of the lead developers (of which there are currently two; Selkrener is the head coder and top boss. We also have a small staff.). To give some background, Lithmeria is a MUD
In online gaming, a MUD (multi-user dungeon), pronounced /mʌd/, is a multi-user real-time virtual world described entirely in text. It combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world. Players interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language.
-- Wikipedia
with a high fantasy setting. There are two factions, which are engaged in an on-going, long-term conflict, that players will be able to be part of. Characters can be one of eight classes, two of which are based on the rogue archetype (one for each side of the conflict). As developers, Selkrener and I encourage discussion on the forums about what potential players want to see in the game. One of the threads on the forums is the Skill Ideas and Suggestions topic, and a discussion about locks and lockpicking came up. We were presented with simple question with complex underpinning: Should rogues be able to pick locks?
There are a couple of issues with implicit in the question:
- If locks can be picked, will anyone bother to use locks?
- If they are too difficult to pick, will anyone bother to try?
- Is it worth people's anger at being stolen from, to have this cool thief feature?
- Will people be disappointed if we leave out one of the key elements of the traditional "rogue" class?
Boiled down, the issue is twofold: it it's hard to find a middle ground between lock picking being useless and the locks themselves being useless, and it's no fun to be robbed, even if it's realistic (and fun for the thief).
There are a couple of problems with having useless skills in a game. The first issue is the coder time involved. Selkrener is an amazing coder, and he works fast, but every hour or day spent futzing with something that turns out to be philosophically flawed is an hour or day that we don't get something awesome, like mobs (the computer guys that you kill, or get quests from, etc.) with the capacity to fight almost as good as a real person, or a mapping system that is real-time accurate and can generate pixel-perfect graphical maps. A second issue is that having something philosophically flawed means that we start to lose the faith of our playerbase. If we implement bad ideas, then they know that our ideas aren't always good, and start to expect that new features that we implement later on won't be good. For obvious reasons, this is a Bad Thing, especially because of how important it is to us that we maintain the faith of the playerbase.
Happily, forum-goers at least understood the underlying issues with lock-picking, but it was clear that if it could be done well, people wanted to see it. People tried to come up with good ideas, and other people regretfully shot them down as flawed. Behind the scenes, Selkrener and I followed the conversation, having our own discussions about what the end decision would have to be.
We wanted lock-picking to be fun. If things aren't fun, they don't go into our game. We didn't want to ruin anybody's gaming experience because they got stolen from, either, though. In MUDs, getting killed means you tend to lose about an hour's worth of effort, and your ego gets stunned. But getting stolen from can mean losing weeks, months of work, and sometimes what gets stolen cannot be replaced. We didn't want that to happen, but that didn't mean we couldn't have lockpicking.
Then Selkrener, with the help of the forum-goers, hit on an idea--instead of having the locks (that can be picked) be on chests, or to shop shelves, or allowing thievery of a person, why not restrict lockpicking to doors? Rogues would be able to break into houses, but since houses were otherwise completely secure (as opposed to other MUDs, where there are myriad ways to travel, including teleportation analogues that allow you to travel directly to a person), being able to break in wouldn't be so bad, but there could still be consequences. Not theft (unless the homeowner was particularly unwise), but it would make assassinations (a key feature of rogues!) viable, and if a rogue could get securely ensconced into a house in a city, they would have a safe place from which to raid.
It could work!
Then of course, he had to figure out how it would work, but Selkrener is nothing if not brilliant. If you're curious to see how the idea turned out, you can read the update here on the forums.